At TriFinance, it's common to showcase beautiful photos of breakfasts, yoga sessions, or team activities. Foosball tables, darts, and ping pong tables have made their way into our offices. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, they certainly don’t guarantee workplace happiness.
Is all the fuss around workplace happiness important?
You spend more than 75,000 hours of your life working. Imagine feeling bad about yourself during many of those hours – it would be a personal tragedy. But the opposite is also true. If you feel good at work, that's almost half the battle towards a happy life.
As of 2024, there has already been plenty of research on (workplace) happiness. In 2021, Dajo De Prins published the book "Work Happiness". The book includes many scientific insights as well as practical tools for both employees and organizations. One such tool is the Four Sevens method. It works like this: Ask yourself the following four questions and score them on a scale of 0 to 10.
- Are you generally satisfied with your job?
- On an average workday, do you experience significantly more positive than negative feelings?
- Are you actively engaged in your job?
- This requires some explanation. This isn’t about minimal involvement (doing just enough to go home with your paycheck). It's about experiencing emotions through your work such as dedication, motivation, persistence, pride, etc. This means you’re often willing to do more for your job than what is strictly expected.
- Do you have the enduring sense that what you do is meaningful?
If you score seven or more on all four questions, you are experiencing work happiness. Know that work happiness is rare. Many people, about 90%, are satisfied with their jobs. However, when ranked from 1 to 40, where 40 is the least pleasant activity, work is ranked at 39. Only 5% of Flemish people find their work truly meaningful.
It's about a sustainable HR and organizational policy
Work happiness is not about one-off measures or actions, appointing a Chief Happiness Officer, or having weekly flowers in the office. It’s about a sustainable HR and organizational policy that works on all the elements linked to "good work" simultaneously. This is precisely what Fons Leroy, Katelijn Nijsmans, and Dajo De Prins emphasize in their book “Working on Work Happiness,” published on Monday. The book includes practical examples for each aspect, and TriFinance contributed one as well.
Work Happiness requires significant effort
There’s nothing wrong with striving for (work) happiness. But it requires significant effort. An environment that gives you space, offers opportunities, and starts from intrinsic motivation is certainly not an obstacle in your quest for work happiness. At TriFinance, we provide exactly that environment for our Me inc.®'ers. Happiness is complex, and work happiness even more so. However, delving into the topic can be done easily through the works mentioned, which are the sources for this text.
